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Horapollo
Horapollo (from Horus Apollo; grc-gre, Ὡραπόλλων) is the supposed author of a treatise, titled ''Hieroglyphica'', on Egyptian hieroglyphs, extant in a Greek translation by one Philippus, dating to about the 5th century. Life Horapollo is mentioned by the Suda (ω 159) as one of the last leaders of the Egyptian priesthood at a school in Menouthis, near Alexandria, during the reign of Zeno (AD 474–491). According to the Suda, Horapollo had to flee because he was accused of plotting a revolt against the Christians, and his temple to Isis and Osiris was destroyed. Horapollo was later captured and after torture converted to Christianity. Another, earlier, Horapollo alluded to by the Suda was a grammarian from Phanebytis, under Theodosius II (AD 408–450). To this Horapollo the ''Hieroglyphica'' was attributed by most 16th-century editors, although there were more occult opinions, identifying Horapollo with Horus himself, or with a pharaoh. Horapollo wrote comme ...
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Pierio Valeriano Bolzani
Pierio Valeriano (1477–1558), born Giovanni Pietro dalle Fosse, was a prominent Italian Renaissance humanist, specializing in the early study of Egyptian hieroglyphs. His most famous works were ''On the Ill Fortune of Learned Men (De litteratorum infelicitate)'' and ''Hieroglyphica, sive, De sacris Aegyptiorvm literis commentarii'', a study on hieroglyphics and their use in allegory. Early life (1477–1509) Valeriano was born in Belluno, Italy, on 2 February 1477 to a poor family. His father, Lorenzo, was a craftsman who died around 1492, leaving a widow and four children in poverty with a young Valeriano as head of the household. He began his schooling in Belluno at the public school of Giosippo Faustino, a man who Valeriano would later describe as a gifted and talented teacher. Valeriano remembered his schooling fondly, but constantly felt the burden of supporting his family. Around 1493, Valeriano was brought to Venice by his uncle Fra Urbano Bolzanio, a well-connected ...
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Athanasius Kircher
Athanasius Kircher (2 May 1602 – 27 November 1680) was a German Jesuit scholar and polymath who published around 40 major works, most notably in the fields of comparative religion, geology, and medicine. Kircher has been compared to fellow Jesuit Roger Joseph Boscovich and to Leonardo da Vinci for his enormous range of interests, and has been honoured with the title "Master of a Hundred Arts".Woods, p. 108. He taught for more than 40 years at the Roman College, where he set up a wunderkammer. A resurgence of interest in Kircher has occurred within the scholarly community in recent decades. Kircher claimed to have deciphered the hieroglyphic writing of the ancient Egyptian language, but most of his assumptions and translations in this field were later found to be incorrect. He did, however, correctly establish the link between the ancient Egyptian and the Coptic languages, and some commentators regard him as the founder of Egyptology. Kircher was also fascinated ...
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Giorgio Valla
Giorgio Valla (Latin: ''Georgius Valla''; Piacenza 1447–Venice 1500) was an Italian academic, mathematician, philologist and translator. Life He was born in Piacenza in 1447. He was the son of Andrea Valla and Cornelia Corvini. At the age of fifteen Giorgio Valla moved to Milan, where he was educated by the famous Neoplatonic Hellenist Constantine Lascaris. Among his works is a Latin translation of the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo and Aristarchus's ''On the Sizes and Distances'' (1488). The '' De expetendis et fugiendis rebus'' is the most valuable work produced by Valla. He lectured in physics and in medicine at Pavia and Venice. His ''magnum opus'' included Boethian arithmetic and music, and Euclidean geometry, law and rhetoric, among other matters.(here cited page 128) Works Treatises * ''De orthographia'' (1495), Vienna. * ''De expedita ratione argumentandi'' (1498; also Basel, 1529). * ''Logica'' (1498), Venice. * ''De simplicium natura'' (1528) Strassburg (on ...
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Cristoforo Buondelmonti
Cristoforo Buondelmonti (c. 1385 – c. 1430) was an Italian Franciscan priest and traveler, and a pioneer in promoting first-hand knowledge of Greece and its antiquities throughout the Western world. Biography Cristoforo Buondelmonti was born around 1385 into an important Florentine family. He was taught Greek by Guarino da Verona and received further education from Niccolò Niccoli, an influential Florentine humanist. By 1414 he had become a priest and served as a rector of a church in Florence.Gothoni 2003 He left his native city around 1414 in order to travel, mainly in the Aegean Islands. He visited Constantinople in the 1420s. He is the author of two historical-geographic works: the ''Descriptio insulae Cretae'' (1417, in collaboration with Niccolò Niccoli) and the ''Liber insularum Archipelagi'' (1420). These two books are a combination of geographical information and contemporary charts and sailing directions. The latter one contains the oldest surviving map of Consta ...
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Egyptian Hieroglyphs
Egyptian hieroglyphs (, ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt, used for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters.There were about 1,000 graphemes in the Old Kingdom period, reduced to around 750 to 850 in the classical language of the Middle Kingdom, but inflated to the order of some 5,000 signs in the Ptolemaic period. Antonio Loprieno, ''Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction'' (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), p. 12. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. Through the Phoenician alphabet's major child systems (the Greek and Aramaic scripts), the Egyptian hieroglyphic script is ancestral to the majority of scripts in modern use, most prominently the Latin and ...
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Homer
Homer (; grc, Ὅμηρος , ''Hómēros'') (born ) was a Greek poet who is credited as the author of the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'', two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer is considered one of the most revered and influential authors in history. Homer's ''Iliad'' centers on a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles during the last year of the Trojan War. The ''Odyssey'' chronicles the ten-year journey of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, back to his home after the fall of Troy. The poems are in Homeric Greek, also known as Epic Greek, a literary language which shows a mixture of features of the Ionic and Aeolic dialects from different centuries; the predominant influence is Eastern Ionic. Most researchers believe that the poems were originally transmitted orally. Homer's epic poems shaped aspects of ancient Greek culture and education, fostering ideals of heroism, glory, and honor. To Plato, Homer was simply the one ...
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Hellenistic Civilization
In Classical antiquity, the Hellenistic period covers the time in Mediterranean history after Classical Greece, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the emergence of the Roman Empire, as signified by the Battle of Actium in 31 BC and the conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt the following year. The Ancient Greek word ''Hellas'' (, ''Hellás'') was gradually recognized as the name for Greece, from which the word ''Hellenistic'' was derived. "Hellenistic" is distinguished from "Hellenic" in that the latter refers to Greece itself, while the former encompasses all ancient territories under Greek influence, in particular the East after the conquests of Alexander the Great. After the Macedonian invasion of the Achaemenid Empire in 330 BC and its disintegration shortly after, the Hellenistic kingdoms were established throughout south-west Asia ( Seleucid Empire, Kingdom of Pergamon), north-east Africa ( Ptolemaic Kingdom) and South Asia ( Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, Indo-Gree ...
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Syllabary
In the linguistic study of written languages, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) moras which make up words. A symbol in a syllabary, called a syllabogram, typically represents an (optional) consonant sound (simple onset) followed by a vowel sound (nucleus)—that is, a CV or V syllable—but other phonographic mappings, such as CVC, CV- tone, and C (normally nasals at the end of syllables), are also found in syllabaries. Types A writing system using a syllabary is ''complete'' when it covers all syllables in the corresponding spoken language without requiring complex orthographic / graphemic rules, like implicit codas ( ⇒ /C1VC2/) silent vowels ( ⇒ /C1V1C2/) or echo vowels ( ⇒ /C1V1C2/). This loosely corresponds to ''shallow'' orthographies in alphabetic writing systems. ''True'' syllabograms are those that encompass all parts of a syllable, i.e. initial onset, medial nucleus and final coda, but since onset ...
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La Ricerca Della Lingua Perfetta Nella Cultura Europea
''La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea'' (''The Search for the Perfect Language (the Making of Europe)''; trans. James Fentress) is a 1993 book by Umberto Eco about attempts to devise an ideal language. The writing is essayistic and uses the myth of Babel as a paradigm for connecting linguistic and social practices. Emphasizing that the quest for a perfect language has never been devoid of ideological motivation, Eco outlines some objections to the idea and suggests that an International Auxiliary Language, such as Esperanto, is a more realistic project. He points out that the impossible quest has had some useful side effects (taxonomy, scientific notations etc.) but dwells mostly on exotic proposals. Lengthy passages are devoted to Dante, Lull, Kircher, various 17th century authors and a few less well-known names from later times. The contemporary project for a politically and culturally unified Europe provides the perspective for a more serious considerati ...
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Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco (5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016) was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator. In English, he is best known for his popular 1980 novel ''The Name of the Rose'', a historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory, as well as ''Foucault's Pendulum,'' his 1988 novel which touches on similar themes. Eco wrote prolifically throughout his life, with his output including children's books, translations from French and English, in addition to a twice-monthly newspaper column "La Bustina di Minerva" (Minerva's Matchbook) in the magazine ''L'Espresso'' beginning in 1985, with his last column (a critical appraisal of the Romantic paintings of Francesco Hayez) appearing 27 January 2016. At the time of his death, he was an Emeritus professor at the University of Bologna, where he taught for much of his life. In the 21st century, he has c ...
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Filippo Fasanini
Filippo is an Italian male given name, which is the equivalent of the English name Philip, from the Greek ''Philippos'', meaning "amante dei cavalli".''Behind the Name''"Given Name Philip" Retrieved on 23 January 2016. The female variant is Filippa. The name may refer to: *Filippo I Colonna (1611–1639), Italian nobleman * Filippo II Colonna (1663–1714), Italian noblemen * Filippo Abbiati (1640–1715), Italian painter * Filippo Baldinucci (1624–1697), Italian historian * Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), Italian architect * Filippo Carli (1876–1938), Italian sociologist * Filippo Castagna (1765–1830), Maltese politician *Filippo Coarelli (born 1936), Italian archaeologist * Filippo Coletti (1811–1894), Italian singer *Filippo di Piero Strozzi (1541–1582), French general * Filippo Salvatore Gilii (1721–1789), Italian priest and linguist *Filippo Grandi (born 1957), Italian diplomat * Filippo Illuminato (1930-1943), Italian partisan, recipient of the Gold Medal ...
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Aldus Manutius
Aldus Pius Manutius (; it, Aldo Pio Manuzio; 6 February 1515) was an Italian printer and humanist who founded the Aldine Press. Manutius devoted the later part of his life to publishing and disseminating rare texts. His interest in and preservation of Greek manuscripts mark him as an innovative publisher of his age dedicated to the editions he produced. His ''enchiridia'', small portable books, revolutionized personal reading and are the predecessor of the modern paperback. Manutius wanted to produce Greek texts for his readers because he believed that works by Aristotle or Aristophanes in their original Greek form were pure and unadulterated by translation. Before Manutius, publishers rarely printed volumes in Greek, mainly due to the complexity of providing a standardized Greek typeface. Manutius published rare manuscripts in their original Greek and Latin forms. He commissioned the creation of typefaces in Greek and Latin resembling the humanist handwriting of his time; type ...
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